Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters says the road to keeping Republican majorities in the U.S. House and Senate starts in Iowa. “Iowa is ground zero for everything politics in the country,” Gruters said this morning.
Gruters is in Iowa today campaigning with candidates for Iowa’s first and third congressional district and he’ll be at the Iowa State Fair tomorrow. During an interview with Radio Iowa, Gruters discussed the Iowa GOP’s lawsuit that the Republican National Committee is backing. It seeks to require that Iowa election officials verify voters’ signatures on the envelopes for mailing absentee ballots. “I talk to the President quite often because after the 2020 cycle he actually put me in charge of the election integrity effort for the whole country and our job was to try to find out what happened and to make sure it never happens again,” Gruters said, “and every single cycle we’ve gotten better.”
Yesterday, a federal court blocked an executive order President Trump issued in March about mailing absentee ballots. It’s likely the Trump Administration will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether the Postal Service, at Trump’s direction, may only send and receive ballots that include tracking barcodes. Gruters said Trump is considering all options. “I’ve talked with the president about maybe a potential executive order, but the bottom line is what the president really wants,” Gruter said. “He wants a safe and secure election. That’s it.”
Gruters indicated a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling is “a game changer” in the way the party may spend its resources for candidates like Ashley Hinson — the Iowa Republican who’s running for the U-S Senate. Until last month, federal regulations had prevented coordination among candidates and other groups, like political parties, that were supporting their campaigns. “Everybody was flying blind,” Gruters said. “What is Congresswoman Hinson doing on the ground to win the Senate seat? And we’d look from outside and because we played by the rules, we don’t have any communication, you’d have a lack of efficiency when it comes to spending resources.”
The Republican National Committee entered July with $129 million more to spend than the Democratic National Committee and Gruters said the change means the GOP will be able to assess where to direct spending in support of Iowa’s competitive races for the US Senate and US House. “We’re sitting on the most money that the Republican Party has ever had in the history of the country,” Gruters said. “In modern political history, the Republican Party has never spent at parity or more than the Democrats. We are going to crush them this cycle with spending. They can’t catch up.”
Gruters said the party’s ad spending will be worth three or four times as much, too, since advertising rates for candidates and political parties will now be the same.